Huawei recently conducted the Better World Summit 2020 under the theme of NetX 2025 & X-Tech on 17th-18th September. The event was live-streamed from the official Huawei Carriers social media channels. Many major telecommunication carriers around the globe joined the event and shared their experience on different topics, primarily focused on the development of the future-proof network.
Peng Song, President of Global Carrier Marketing and Solution Sales at Huawei, started the Better World Summit 2020 by delivering a keynote titled "NetX 2025: Build the Future-oriented Competitive Target Network".
In his keynote speech Mr. Peng highlighted the point that operators need to concentrate more on the network differentiation as it is the future and foundation of the ICT business growth.
He also pointed out that carriers and operators are soon going to go through the major changes in business like bringing more services to customers, providing services to more enterprise customers along with the regular consumers and agreement based services in terms of various factors like speed, latency etc.
According to him, operators need to change the way they plan networks and they need to build the future-proof network. This was the primary point of conversation later on and many leading global operators shared their experiences that how they built their own future-proof network and serve the customers and grow their own business.
Bruno Teyton, Senior Research Director at IDC, shared some interesting stat and information regarding the telecommunication sector and its future. He mentioned that by 2025, there'll be 55.7B connected devices globally of which around 74% will be the IoT devices and enterprise using the AI and automation will see 100% increase in the productivity.
The use of the AI and automation will bring the shorter response time, greater product innovation success and improved customer satisfaction. He also mentioned that more than 50% of the new infrastructure will be deployed on the edge locations and by 2025, 50% of mobile operators with active 5G deployments will leverage network slicing to offer secure and segmented 5G wireless connectivity for enterprise WANs as an attractive alternative to wireline VPNs.
Wei Hongmei, General Manager of China Telecom Shunde Branch, and Wang Zhixuan, Vice President of Shunde Kecan Group, shared their experiences and insights that how working with Huawei they were able to successfully develop Smart Campus in the region.
Wei Hongmei mentioned that how the implementation of the smart campus brought down the OPEX costs to 30% less than the regular and they were able to achieve many milestones like no security guards, zero response time and no blind zones around the campus.
Joachim Horn, Chief Technology and Information Advisor, Smart and PLDT, talked about the Future-proof Transport Network and how it is the heart of a digital service provider. He pointed out that in the era of data consumption and 24/7 work environment, there is no "busy hour" anymore in ICT industry and for telecom operators as it's always busy. So for a congestion free and future proof network, it needs to be designed for the peak throughput, not the average throughput and then only an operator will be able to serve the customers properly and fulfill their needs.
According to him, a congestion-free network that is designed for the peak throughput need to have some basic but important elements like low latency, legacy free, highly resilient, highly scalable and a covered network.
He also mentioned that the transport network transformation takes time and money, so operators must define and plan the priorities perfectly as the first step. So the customer experience must be the top priority and instead of the system focused, it needs to be designed as the service oriented network.
Wu Xiangdong, Vice President of China Telecom Research Institute, talked about the planning for the cloud-network convergence under the title of ‘Accelerate the Planning and Construction of Cloud Network Integration to Create New Advantages of Digital Economy’. He shared the idea that network is the foundation for digital economic development and the transformation of economic structure urges a new-generation Internet architecture.
The core of the future network architecture is cloud which will make the network architecture simpler and support flexible user access. And that is why the cloud migration is the key approach for telcos to enable the industry as 96% enterprises outside China are already with cloud technology and 40% enterprises in China are using the cloud.
Mutual promotion between leading technologies and innovative business redefine the benchmark of the ICT industry. He also shared the key points of the Cloud-Network convergence and the steps to execute it properly while fulfilling all technical objectives and principles for the development of Cloud-Network convergence.
Dan Bieler, Principal Analyst, Forrester talked on the ‘Convergence and Innovation Empower Operators for a New Future’ under which he covered that how enterprise customers in all sectors and of all company sizes in most countries are digitizing their operations due to COVID-19 pandemic and the Work-from-Home culture growing. The new types of customer engagements are coming out, hybrid online-offline experiences are growing and the product and service delivery are improving too as a result of this pandemic.
In the post-COVID19 era, carriers have the opportunities to provide more offerings as digital service providers to serve the consumers and enterprises equally for digital transformation using the 5G technology
He pointed out that operating a modern network infrastructure and launching digitalized offerings brings new challenges for carriers like the network complexity, increase of CDR and data traffic, legacy BSS/OSS and the cost. But still carriers must adjust their offerings to serve changing customer needs and expectations like real-time billing, real-time provisioning and omnichannel customer engagement.
According to him, a converged approach to management of key technologies offers several major benefits for modern platform infrastructure operations. Some of the key benefits are efficiency, speed and agility, flexibility, better experience, more revenue and innovation.
Khawla Al Jaber, Zain Group Strategy and Performance Director, shared insights regarding Zain’s journey of digital transformation as an operator under the title ‘AI for Smart Networks’. She mentioned that AI is the key part of Zain’s digital priority initiatives and Zain is focusing on three main areas – Digital First, Optimization and Simplification, and Analytics.
She mentioned that AI is at the heart of our Multi-service Network strategy and Zain believe that 5G will accelerate the adoption of AI in telecom industry and so Zain has launched 5G in three of its main operations.
Sasa Lekovic, CTO of Telenor Serbia and Montenegro, talked about the ‘Digital Transformation for New ICT Infrastructure’. He shared that Telenor’s aim for digital transformation is to become a fully online company and handle the data in real-time. For this they have started three initiatives- fully automated AI based customer service, cloud infrastructure and AI-based data analytics.
He shared the predictions that most companies will shift from being data-generating to data-powered, making use of the actionable data and business insights for which low latency and high reliability will be the biggest factors. So the fast data and actionable data will be come to the forefront of the ICT industry.
He mentioned that we are living in the data age in which the data usage is increasing exponentially. A smart home in a smart city is expected to create 10Gb data per day. And due to this massive generation of the data, consumers are tend to store the data now on either public cloud or enterprise cloud.
Tiina HÓ§ckert, Director of Access Design at Elisa, shared their network strategy under the title “Customer Experience Driven Network Design.” Elisa’s network strategy is primarily based on three points – technology selections, network asset optimization and the making clear ramp down plan for the legacy technologies.
This strategy also helps in upgrading customers actively to faster technologies for better customer experience and optimizes fixed network utilization.
At last Bill Qin, Director of Network Information Marketing Department, Huawei Carrier Business shared the insight that the 5G network deployment laid the foundation for an intelligent and fully connected world and now it's time to harness it for industry applications using Huawei's X-Tech E2E solution that is designed to help carriers for their digital transformation.